December 2022 Newsletter

Walmart Consulting

From late November to early December, I worked with a team of four others on a project for Walmart to enhance the in-store experience with technology and digital touchpoints. We had three weeks to create a stand-alone deck—a presentation that is not presented but sent to be read by a company. The experience was thrilling, demanding, and enlightening.

The team appointed a Project Manager (PM) and divided into two sub-teams to research different areas and answer key questions. We were all enthusiastic and eager to succeed, but quickly encountered difficulties.

We had poor team communication as a result of being on different time zones. We had set up some project management tools on Notion, but we abandoned them almost instantly as most of the team was unfamiliar with how to use these tools.

On a personal level, I had to step up to pull the extra weight resulting from our lacking team dynamic. I interviewed former Walmart employees in the smart-store departments of Walmart’s team and conducted some customer interviews to validate our ideas and collect data.

During one interview, I was speaking to David Katz, a former Walmart employee, founder of Neptyne, and a friend that I used to play Magic: the Gathering with, he gave me a really interesting idea. He specifically worked at Store 8, a Walmart startup that was trying to build an in-home delivery system by using smart locks. We talked about how groceries were the majority of what Walmart sells because they are repeat purchases. Having narrowed down the largest section of Walmart sales, we brainstormed ideas. His first idea was a recipe recommendation feature in the Walmart app and in-stores that would recommend recipes based on a customer’s past purchases and what they have in their cart while shopping.

After explaining this one idea to my team over a Loom video and finding some data about how personalization is the future of the retail sector, we decided that this was going to be the core of our recommendation for Walmart.

Over the next week, with a little help from my team, I built the entire deck and got feedback from my TKS directors and alumni, and from some friends and family. We submitted the deck within the hour it was due and celebrated. Well when I say I celebrated, I actually went to lift weights with some friends and then sit down to work on another programming project long into the night.

Releasing latindictionary.io (v2)

At the beginning of 2022, I released the first version of latindictionary.io, my online Latin dictionary. Many people from my school and online asked why I would build a Latin dictionary. The answer never seemed to satisfy them until they heard how many people actually use it. I was inspired to create the dictionary because there was no online Latin dictionary that allowed me to find accurate definitions and parse the forms of words. All the dictionaries that had these two basic features were either too old and slow to be useful or too cryptic to be understood by a high school Latin student. I know I probably still sound crazy for building a Latin dictionary. I'm sure you're thinking, "Why Latin? It's a dead language!" But there are actually more people who use a Latin dictionary than you may think.

Year-to-date, from latindictionary.io and Latin Wordle I’ve had over 250,000 unique users, and over 1.3 million sessions!

Yeah, it seriously surprised me too watching the user count go up!

I wanted a complete revamp of all features, UI, and UX for version 2. I wanted something I could be proud of and monetize. I began work on it at the end of July and worked on it for a month until school started in September. Around this time, I also began working as a contractor for Vestaboard, so I had to slow progress. In the past two weeks, I sat down and completed all the remaining tasks to release version 2. It's better than I could have hoped for!

I added many new features, such as an English-to-Latin dictionary with language auto-detection, a database of ancient Latin texts, word lists, and word games similar to Quizlet's. Students can join classes and share resources, and there is an open-source Latin resources section that is searchable and designed for students who need a refresher on Latin grammar.

All these new features are going to revolutionize how students learn Latin in schools and I’m bringing it to the web completely free!

I’m working on a marketing strategy that will improve my site’s SEO and create a marketing email campaign to spread to schools all around the globe. Wait for more in next month’s issue of my newsletter!

My New Startup

Over the past month, I’ve been working on building the MVP of a job board for high schoolers.

Problem: The is no easy way for most high schoolers to find real-world experience opportunities. From personal experience, the only way to actually get an internship is to either have a personal connection to a company or get incredibly lucky to find a company that lists their internships publicly.

Status Quo: There are websites like internships.com, but they are not meant for high schoolers, and they don’t have good job search algorithms that actually find opportunities for students, many of the results are positions to work at a high school.

Solution: My solution is to build an online job board, especially for high school students and companies looking to hire interns or employees.

The idea was inspired by talking to a few of my friends that got internships over the summer and hearing how difficult and how lucky they got to find their internships. After my internship at Vestaboard over the summer, which I stumbled upon by complete luck, I realized that for the majority of students around the world, there was almost no hope of ever finding an opportunity that was in an area of expertise or near them.

For the past couple of weeks, I've been building the MVP and discussing potential features with friends and contacts. I'm still having difficulty finding an effective way to vet students, so I'm gathering feedback from hiring managers and CEOs. I anticipate releasing the site by the end of January. My first goal is to get 100 job listings within the first two months of release.

Marketing my Platform Marketing will be the most difficult problem to solve for this startup. It's analogous to the chicken and egg problem: I need companies to post job listings for students to sign up, but students won't sign up unless there are jobs. My first idea was to offer companies a few free/discounted job listings with a money-back guarantee if they get no applicants. But I'm not satisfied with this being the primary marketing strategy. I do have rather large networks of somewhat vetted students through school and TKS, so I should be able to get the first few hundred student users that way.

I'm planning to run PPC (pay-per-click) ads to target people searching for high school jobs. I have a few ideas for partnerships with other companies, but the biggest challenge is getting the first 100 job listings.

I have ambitious plans for this project, but I must overcome many obstacles to reach them. It will be a thrilling, yet difficult journey.

Looking Forward

From building a website with over 100,000 monthly active users to consulting for Walmart a company that brings the most revenue worldwide, this past year was exciting and the most productive yet.

The new year looks even more promising, I’m planning on releasing the website for my second startup and have some more major ideas in the works. Subscribe to my newsletter to come with me along the way!